Test Movie Review: A strangely hollow game
Test Movie Review(2.5 / 5)
Interiority.
It’s a character’s private world, their unspoken thoughts, the bulk of what makes their personality, what gives them life. When there is interiority, you begin to understand a character—truly. Their thoughts, their motivations; you begin to get them in theory first, but slowly, you begin to sync with them. This isn’t necessarily about attachment—it’s about emotional union, even with those whose decisions you might never make or agree with. I fear Test, for all its ambition, for all its commentary on obsession, for all its felt performances, still struggles to generate this crucial interiority.
Perhaps that’s why Arjun, a fading superstar cricketer played by Siddharth, feels so unchanged, so incomprehensibly still—despite the storm around him. There’s a moment where he does something unthinkable, something deeply against his grain, and yet, the moment drifts past us. We don’t sit with his internal struggle, we don’t feel the weight of it. We don't quite see him shake under it.
And there’s often too much left to the imagination, I think. Like that moment when Meera Jasmine’s Padma rains several slaps on Arjun. We can fill in the blanks. Yes, it must suck to be practically a single parent. Yes, it must suck to deal with this impassive man. But as the scene unfolds—with all its movement, with Padma collapsing in near-exhaustion—I found myself strangely unmoved. Like these weren’t real people in a real moment. Like these were actors hitting their marks.
I get specific about these characters because the film is about them—Arjun and Padma, Sara and Kumudha. Three of them are driven by obsession. Two are possibly geniuses. Test is about the price of being extraordinary, the emotional toll it takes. It’s also about the disturbing contrast in how the state and society respond to two men who are both national assets.
And yet, for all its supposed balance, it’s the men who get the genius tags, and the women, the role of dependents. Padma’s sacrificed career gets a brief mention. Kumudha’s love for children is stated many times, almost never felt. The emotional range afforded to these women pales in comparison too. Despite less screen time, Padma comes across more human than Kumudha—a telling sign of how Nayanthara’s character is written and perceived. Kumudha is filtered through Sara’s exasperated lens. She’s framed as a nag, and her erratic responses to Sara left me as anxious about her as she is about him. Even her supposed devotion to her students—“Peththaa dhaan amma va irukkanumnu illa”—feels more like information handed over than something we absorb.
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: R Madhavan, Siddharth, Nayanthara, Meera Jasmine, Kaali Venkat
And then there’s Madhavan, who does his damndest to keep Sara from sliding into caricature. But the film doesn’t help him. His descent into darkness is abrupt, underwritten. Yes, we understand why he might want to cash in on a desperate opportunity, but that’s not the same as feeling it. And yet, you can see Madhavan toiling. You can see it in that striking scene where he tells Kumudha that she, too, is culpable. You see it when he slaps a child—and regrets it with every fibre of his being (Almost every character slaps someone.) Still, even Sara teeters on the edge of excess—like in that bridge scene.
It’s a film rich with emotional possibilities, a breeding ground for nuance and complexity. But it hopes, a bit too optimistically, that the sum of its intense moments will somehow coalesce into something meaningful. It never quite bridges the emotional gap between us and its characters. These people never come to feel like more than the lines they speak, more than their occasionally arbitrary floods of emotion.
After more than 150 minutes, I still couldn’t answer fundamental questions: Why does Arjun initially comply so easily, only to resist when the stakes are highest? Why does Sara’s descent happen so quickly, so theatrically? Why does Kumudha want a child so badly that Sara is an afterthought? And mind you, these are the film’s core characters.
I want to root for a film like Test, one that dares to explore murky corners of morality, one that doesn’t shy away from darkness. But for that to happen, I must be invested in the people who walk through that darkness. I must feel their humanness. And in this case, I never quite did. Which is why, when information is passed at the end that a good character is killed off toward the end, I didn’t blink. What did it matter?
What did anything?